


Arioso

by LNJames



Series: Suddenly Everything Has Changed [14]
Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-28
Updated: 2019-04-28
Packaged: 2020-02-09 11:38:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,832
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18637375
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LNJames/pseuds/LNJames
Summary: Say black body of starsSeason 4 gently referenced.





	Arioso

_Say electromagnetic radiation  
_

Earth was a funny thing, so full of life it seemed impossibly crowded and cacophonously loud. It was different than Krypton, red and dusty and dying a fiery death. And it was the exact opposite of the Phantom Zone, a place so quiet and dark and lonely that Kara Zor-El wondered how any living thing, including herself, could ever exist in that kind of empty void. There were some things that might never leave her no matter how hard she tried or how dazzlingly blue-green alive Earth could be.

Kara crept into her bedroom, trying to keep the window frame she was pushing down behind her from making too much noise. The Midvale night had grown darker, the Danvers house quieter. When she skidded to a soft stop on the porch roof, Kara wondered if she could ever be quiet enough in this world. Through the air, her heart had beat so loudly in her own ears and her breath had come so quickly that she thought the world could finally hear her when she had tried so hard to hide. The ocean still clung to her lips and her knees were sandy and her arms and hands stung from the touch of something that made Kara Zor-El wonder. Who was she, the girl who fell. Kara had snatched darkness before the sea could have her, burning her hands on pale skin and making Kara’s cheeks hot at the curious look the girl gave her.

“What the hell, Kara?”

Her room was dark, but not dark enough and Alex’s hiss of words were not entirely unexpected. It was becoming harder and harder to hide secrets from her earth sister, mainly because Kara hated how it made her feel on the inside. It was a challenge keeping the biggest secret she supposedly ever had confined to so few people. How was she supposed to be a kid when she instead was an alien who fell from the stars and landed here, in Midvale, brought to the Danvers family home like a stray and asked to blend in to a world she never knew.

“Shhh, you’ll wake Eliza.”

Kara hissed back, stumbling a little as she climbed over the window seat in their shared room and tried to be quiet. Nothing was ever quiet.

“Where were you?”

Another low question as she watched Alex sit up in her bed. The gulf between a seventeen year old sister put in charge of a sixteen year old alien roared sometimes. Always, always there was hint of scold and hint of panic in Alex’s voice and Kara was never sure why. It had always been there, mixed with exasperation and impatience depending upon Alex’s mood. It made Kara feel like she was a burden or a watched thing not to be trusted. She had felt it the second Kal-El let go of her hand in a green, green yard, the sun so bright Kara could barely see after all that darkness. There were two people waiting for her who were not her parents on a planet that was not her own. All of this living breathing life thrust upon her after finally waking from the everlasting sleep of the Phantom Zone. How could Kara be expected to know what was expected?

With softer footsteps in bare feet, Kara padded across the bedroom, her hands surreptitiously brushing off sand while she undressed. She had a secret and wasn’t ready to share. As she pulled on a clean t-shirt for sleeping, Kara wanted to keep a dark haired girl from the beach to herself.

“Nowhere.”

Alex watched her carefully as she pulled out her ponytail and shook her windblown hair.

“What were you doing?”

“Nothing.”

Kara could smell the ocean whispering in her ear, filling her mouth. There was a particular taste that came with being alive. Kara would have never known this if it hadn’t been for the Phantom Zone. Somewhere in that blackness, when her eyes no longer worked and she was breathing in the air of nothingness, she tasted a pinprick of light at the edge of consciousness. It was the salt sting of an event horizon. It was a miracle. It was magic. As she spun on and on, neither here nor there, Kara kept that taste and gave it a name. _Shahrrehth_. It was the only thing that kept her mind from disappearing. It’s what was stinging her lips now. Except this taste came from the touch of someone whose eyes saw her for what she was. There was no other way to explain it.

“You know you’re a terrible liar.”

Kara laid her head down on her pillow and looked over at Alex, her sister’s coming quiet instead of harsh. She watched Alex’s silhouette in their darkened room lay down until they stared at each other in the night. Kara sighed out soft words.

“I know.”

“Mom wouldn’t want you getting caught up there.”

It had been a long time since she had taken Alex into the air. The first time had been exultant, the second time dangerous, and there was no third time. Now, Kara kept it to herself as best she could, the way the air called her name and how she felt in it. There was weight to it here in this planet’s atmosphere when it should feel free. She had fallen through the air and she had returned again and again on her own accord. She was quickly learning the price of freedom on earth and the cost it could have. Still.

“Sometimes I need to..fly..”

She might never explain it to Alex in a way that a human would understand. A plane was one thing, but the invisible wings on her back were another.

“Just be careful and don’t get caught, Mom would kill me.”

For a moment, the sound of waves crashing thundered in her head until she practiced The Quiet and finally the loudness fell away. It had taken years, but Kara was getting better. She could hold all the sounds in the world at bay if she concentrated hard enough. Streaky’s light jump on to her bed now, curling against the back of her legs, reminded her of learning to be soft and how long that took. How long that still takes. Kara closed her eyes briefly and let go, allowing her body to feel cat paws kneading against her calves. She tried so hard. She really did. The rhythmic purr of Streaky slowly shifted and she heard a new, different sound sliding its way into her ears. Chamber doors opening, chamber doors closing, fluid eternally in motion, washing from one side of the cell to the other, swirling and whirling. It made her own lungs expand in sympathy and Kara let that steady beat sink into her.

“Alex?”

“Yeah?”

“What does love sound like?”

There was a long pause from the other side of the room. Kara knew it was a silly question, she had known family love, her parents, Kal-El, even the Danvers. _Ukiem_. That was the word she remembered from home. She knew what that felt like. And she knew what its absence sounded like, the loss, the lack. The complete and utter silence so heavy it was crushing. But for once, she wondered. Was there something else? How would she know?

“You’re so strange sometimes, Kara.”

She heard her own voice sound tiny.

“I know.”

It was quiet in their room for a moment and Kara wondered if her older sister, the one she was given, would ever understand her. Even after Kenny Li and the trouble they had found and solved together last year, there was still a divide. She needed Alex because it was the closest thing she had to normal or the answers to get there. Maybe one day they would be close, maybe one day they could find a way to exist without all the stuff that came with school and friends and teenagers and family and all the other normal human things she tried to understand and be good at. She heard Alex take a deep breath across the room.

“I don’t know if it has a sound, but I think I know it feels.”

Alex’s quiet voice soothed her. Sometimes Midvale wasn’t as lonely as she thought.

“You do?”

“Don’t sound so incredulous, Kara. I do have a life outside of this room you know.”

She smiled in the darkness and looked over at the lump in Alex’s bed.

“Ok, so how does it feel?”

There was another pause and the room was quiet for a long time. Kara could tell that Alex was thinking, searching for the right words, wanting to be precise. Humans sometimes were reluctant to say what they felt. On Krypton, such things were understood and there were many words for feelings. From the back of her mind, she tried to remember the word even when it had been far outside of her experience as a young girl. _Shovuh_? No. That was the feeling she had for Streaky, for hot cocoa, for the air.

“It feels...scary...and intense and electric...”

Kara felt her brows crinkle before Alex continued.

“It feels like your heart is going explode. It goes so fast when you see..that person..and you shake a little bit when..they’re near you or if they touch you.”

Maybe what she meant was... _zhao_. Was this the word she felt?

“But it’s also..soft..and warm..and..”

Kara waited, she had time. Instead of wondering how Alex knew such things, her mind went instead to how she felt when she caught a stranger falling into the sea, heart racing a mile a minute while scooping a girl out of thin air, fingers sparking as they pressed against soft warm skin. How could she call this love - the way every piece of her fell into place, the way her hands reached for what was missing, the way everything she kept inside for so long poured out golden between her ribs? How could that be love? It was an unknown. It was a stranger. It was just a dark haired girl she’d never met whose eyes saw her in that same, different way. It didn’t seem possible.

“And?”

She prompted Alex because her sister, the one earth had given her, was too quiet, lost in her own thoughts on the other side of the room.

“And you..just..know..”

As if it were that easy, to just know something when all she did was feel and hear and see, her body experiencing the world while her mind and heart caught up. There was little Kara could count on in this brave new world of being sixteen on a messy planet full of life and full of things she didn’t know. But somewhere out there was the key that would unlock all the answer. She had to believe. And she had believed. It’s what kept her from losing everything in the Phantom Zone. There were Kryptonian words for what got her through and she had translated them as best she could. _Faith. Hope_. These were things that required the heart and the head to work together to survive. She knew this was where her power came from even if the sun helped make miracles happen. But was there something else? Something else that might fuel her?

Tickling in her ear like a salt whisper was an opening and a closing like clockwork, another heart beating in the dark and she tucked the sound down deep between her ribs. There was golden room inside of her where she kept the things she loved, glowing and warm. It had been created from the spark of an event horizon where her pod circled for an eternity and spun all possibilities together into threads intertwined and raveled together. In that room, there were steps and the spaces between now and then. In that room, there was a name just beyond her reach. In that room was a song on repeat, a record skipping over and over again, notes striking the right chords.

Kara rolled on to her back and exhaled, her eyes landing on the ceiling. For a moment, all she could see were the cracks in the sheetrock, grains on the surface, molecules of paint. And then her eyes adjust and she was looking beyond the details, beyond the plaster and the wood and the shake shingles. Now she was looking past the wind and through the hazy curve of the atmosphere until all she could see were the memory burns of stars in patterns she tried to learn.

Kara tried, she really did.

A new song unraveling in her ears lulled her to sleep.

 ***

Lena wasn’t sure how long she stayed exactly where she was, back in the sand looking up into the night sky. The ocean still sloshed methodically, washing out her thoughts and bringing them back in again like a relentless nudge in her brain. _It’s..you...it’s..you...it’s..you._ With each wave, she marked a line in the sand from each leg to above her head until she imagined that she had wings like a snow angel, lines fanning out in the sand for every time she felt the sting of a miracle and heard the whisper of a possibility. Lena wondered how long she could lay on this beach before the tide took her out to sea. Would the golden girl return? Was she real? Or had Lena fallen asleep here at the foot of the tall cliff below the family coastal retreat like she had many times before? When she finally sat up and stared out into the darkness, Lena Luthor knew the lines her fingers made in the sand would never see the light of day, the numbers they counted would never add up.

The large stucco house was quiet and dark by the time she returned, trudging her way back up countless wind-worn stairs and picking a path through tall sea grass and brambles and grape vines between the ocean and the excess of the Luthors’ summer home. Lena could only hope that Lionel and Lillian and the Graves were passed out from day drinking that turned into night drinking that always turned darker than that. She had learned over the years to avoid the wrath that came with such things, the fear that sparked when moods and drinks turned to scotch. Lionel became someone else, smaller and angry while Lillian laughed at him and poured more for them both. She and Lex had their own ways of hiding when it all fell down around them.

Lena quietly closed the back door off the kitchen as her eyes adjusted to the dark. Glasses were everywhere, abandoned wine and small plates and stinky cheese left out to rot. The aftermath of a Luthor-Graves summer night was hard to miss. Like forbidden fruit, Lena took a swig from a full glass of the estate wine and grimaced as she swallowed it. It made her mouth dry while it zinged straight to her head, slowing down her thoughts enough to focus. She hated that she secretly loved a thing that took away the pain it caused. She hated that she took another long drink of wine and felt better because of it, as if alcohol was the only way to make sense of what happened tonight. It burned bright in her throat as if to taste the blaze of heaven and her hands stopped shaking. The last gulp didn’t hurt at all.

“Well well well, if it isn’t the Lost Princess. Where you been, sis?”

Lena startled and turned her head towards her father’s study off kitchen. Even in their vacation home, Lionel had his room, the one where there was equal joy and pain. When she was little, if she were real quiet and real patient, Lionel let her creep into the Luthor Library while he had an after dinner scotch to ponder his next move. He would let her “sneak” a book to read, tucked under the ottoman or behind tall heavy curtains. He chuckled when she selected her favorite books, always books with pictures of the infinitely small or the infinitely large. Biology and cosmology, the universe above and within, cells mutating and stars burning. Lena was mesmerized by it all. She’d fall asleep, small child with heavy eyes reluctant to close and only wake when rough hands and a gruff voice pushed her out and to bed.

Now Lionel’s coastal library only held her lanky brother, sitting at their father’s desk and writing or drawing in one of his ever present journals. In the low light, Lex’s mop of brown hair couldn’t hide his eyes and the way they studied her, with neither affection nor malice. The gulf in years between them had grown sullen and quiet all around, both of them going in different directions even if they couldn’t name it. Lex was infiltrating Luthor Corporation’s labs at Lionel’s request, learning to put all his brilliance to work for the company. Lena had just been early-admitted to MIT, trying to follow Lex as best she could and yet they kept growing further apart.

With a deep breath, she tried to keep everything about what happened on the beach to herself, hiding away something she wasn’t even sure existed. Something told her that her secrets would never be safe from Lex again so she tucked a golden girl deep inside and crossed her arms over her chest as she leaned against the door frame, her voice low and non-committal.

“Nowhere. And you know I’ve long grown out of being your Anastasia.”

Lex cocked his head to the side and smiled, one that didn’t reach his eyes. Where once they had been close, now there was distance.

“Nowhere, huh? You look and smell like dirty sand and Mom’s last pour. You’ve been gone four hours and twenty three minutes. And you look like you’ve seen a ghost. What have you been up to, Lena?”

Lena let everything pour out of her on the inside, straight from her head down through the bottom of her feet until nothing remained for anyone to see. It was a trick she had learned when Lillian called her out in front of Lionel’s business associates or paraded her among the equestrian social set at the polo club. Empty like a bottle with no message in it or like a blank slate. She took care not to let her jaw set or her eyebrow raise or her eyes show anything other than disinterest.

“I went for a walk. Better out there than in here. I assume your girlfriend Mercy is waiting for you.”

Lex stared at her and the silence held until her brother steepled his fingers in front of him.

“I didn’t know you were the jealous type, Lena, wanting all of my attention.”

“As if. I’ve also grown out of that too, Lex.”

The sooner she could get out of there, the better.

“See anything interesting on the beach tonight? Any shooting stars? Any shiny objects in the sky?”

Lena closed off whatever else might be alive inside of her and stared directly at Lex, his once shaggy hair starting to recede in the dim light and the demands of Luthor Corporation starting to take its budding toll on her brother.

“Nothing but Lyra. Vega was particularly bright tonight.”

Lex looked at her carefully.

“ _Aquila Cadens._ You ever wonder what kind of music comes from the stars, Lena? Do you hear it too?”

Her heart tried not to thump but inside she could hear it, doors opening and doors closing in time to something she was too afraid to name. Her heart, the one she was given and tried to hide from the Luthors only after it was broken, beat against her chest like the worst kept secret. She could feel it against her arm, trying to hold it in tight and could feel it slipping up to her neck, pulsing out a code. I _t’s..you...it’s...you...it’s...you_. No amount of counting could make it stop, no will power could keep her locked inside herself and if she didn’t get away from this room, Lena was afraid it would all come spilling out of her mouth and her eyes. Tightness constricted her throat as she turned to leave from Lex Luthor’s dangerous pull.

“I hear nothing.”

With that, she forced herself to walk away, her legs shaking and the beat beating in her ears and the warm spark of fingers touching her now burned invisible marks into her skin. Lena rushed past the kitchen, grabbing a half bottle of opened red on her way to her room like a lifeline. She could only pray no one would wake as her feet took to the stairs and she ran down the long back hallway far from all the others in a house that was too big to be heard or seen if she tried hard enough. Once she was in her dark summer room, the one she always claimed on these Luthor vacations, she clicked the door shut and fell back against the cool wood.

Everything was dark, everything was quiet.

With one long drink from the bottle, everything roared back into her body, everything she had poured out to keep it safe from Lex came back in like the tide, washing over her. There was the ocean, there were the waves, there was a fallen angel catching her, there was the sting of the salt air on her lips, there was the golden girl, there was the shock of her hand touching a star.

_Vega. Ring Nebula. Uttara Ashadha. Say black body of stars in absorb of all. Say my galaxy._

As she slid down to sit, knees hugged against her, the only thing Lena could hear was a deep song on repeat, skipping over and over again in her head. It all made sense now. She held the magic key and one day it would unlock a mystery, it would open all doors, it would lead her back to a miracle. With each beat of her heart, Lena made a vow to keep counting until the numbers magically added up, until a name she didn’t know yet spilled from her lips at just the right time. All she had to do was be patient and forget everything that happened tonight so her secret would be safe. When she closed her eyes in the darkest part of the night of her fifteenth summer, Lena Luthor unraveled all of the threads, gold and red and the hot of hot burning blue. She let every memory of tonight spin out of her head as if there had never been a solid body in the night sky, glowing and warm and real, flying in salty air that she now licked from her lips.

_It’s..you.._

**Author's Note:**

> Follow these chords, find the threads, do you hear it?
> 
> Interlude in B Minor: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14800022/chapters/36741693
> 
> Interlude in E Major: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17178824


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